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It seems that the telecommunications companies are not sick of ad technology yet.
On Monday, T-Mobile announced plans to buy Vistar Media, an ad platform specializing in digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising. T-Mobile will pay approximately $600 million in cash and expects the deal to close in the next few months pending regulatory approval.
Digital campaigns should account for more than one-third of the $10 billion eMarketer expects customers to spend on OOH media by 2027. DOOH in particular is experiencing a moment as a competitive advertising channel, which is why so many startups have emerged to take advantage of the gray areas between OOH video and connected TV.
In acquiring Vistar Media, “we see a tremendous opportunity to deliver relevant and personalized advertising,” said JP Colaco, SVP and head of T-Mobile’s advertising business, in a statement.
Stay on target
DOOH ads may not be targeted to individuals, but that doesn’t mean these campaigns are devoid of digital-style targeting and measurement.
T-Mobile’s increased mobile subscribers combined with Vistara’s media partnership and OOH technology “mean advertisers can easily place their ads where they know their audience will be,” Colaco said.
OOH use of advertising technology impression multipliersA reach metric based on how many unique mobile devices pass by a particular screen or digital billboard at different times of the day. And T-Mobile has tons of first-party data about its broadband subscriber base.
If an advertiser is trying to reach consumers in a particular region who enjoy, say, gardening or crocheting, that advertiser could hypothetically use a combination of mobile app downloads and location data to target specific physical places or screens where that target audience is located could be found.
The acquisition of Vistar is also a sign that ad technology is still attractive to telcos. There’s a long trend of telcos snapping up media and ad tech startups before eventually reversing their decisions, including AT&T’s Xandr (which sold to Microsoft in 2021), Verizon’s media business consisting of AOL and Yahoo (later sold by Apollo Funds) and Singaporean telecommunications company Singtel by acquiring the demand-side platform Amobee (what that transferred to Nexxen ad platform in 2022).
T-Mobile, which bought an advertising startup focused on ride-sharing Octopus in 2022 and a mobile-focused ad tech company PushSpring in 2019defies the trend.
Regardless of whether T-Mobile keeps Vistar around for the long haul, a a different story. But for now, consider it the first big ad tech acquisition of 2025.
